Over the years I've written a fair amount of stuff for various publications or as part of research projects, or just for the hell of it. By far the bulk of all that stuff was product reviews and I'll not put those here, but I've also done many opinion pieces, mostly because I've got a lot of opinions. The following are a selection of articles of some small historical interest - in some ways they chart the development of educational computing in the UK since the mid 80's, they also chart the development of my own thinking on those developments. If nothing else, you can have a good laugh at the predictions I made.
Note that there's probably copyright issues involved in putting this stuff up - it's not always clear who owns copyright. If you want to quote any of this stuff, I suggest you contact the publication it came from first. If you are one of the publishers and you want me to remove a particular article then mail me and I'll do that immediately.
| Mind that child
1987 An article on how to spot bad educational software - something we're still not very good at. |
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| The Micro's Future in
Schools 1988 Some hopeless crystal ball gazing. Useful for the overview of the state of things then though. |
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| Progress at Any
Price? 1988 An attempt to take stock of where we were, what we were doing and whether or not we should have been doing it. |
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| Read All About It
1988 An account of a newsday we ran. An interesting exersise in trying to cobble together a complex activity from a variety of resources, how difficult it was and why it's still worth doing. |
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| The National
Curriculum and IT 1989 An article written during the development of some of the original National Curriculum documents. A possibly interesting snapshot of where we thought we might have been going. |
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| 400 Children and
IT 1990 Interesting from the point of view of how limited resources were at the time. I still think there's some important ideas here about how we prioritise our use of IT in schools. |
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| Bradwell Village School meets an
alien 1990 Account of the para-normal goings on that were going on back in the days when we first encountered e-mail in school. Read the next two articles for the lowdown on what was really happening. |
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| Suspending Disbelief
1990 Ok - we didn't really meet and alien; we were actually doing kewel early on-line adventuring of a sort. Here's the explaination of how it was organised between two schools. |
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| Lost in Time 1990 This by Michael Gouda - the teacher at the school at the other end of the whole alien thing. I've included this - dispite the risk to my ego - because it fills in more about how the whole alien thing came to be and how it looked from the other end. |
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| Of Mice and
Programmers 1994 Still relavent today, IMHO. While it's centred around the transition from BBC B to Arc, it's also about the informal power structure that drives a lot of developments - they're not very healthy. |
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| Gearing up for the National
Grid 1997 It was all new then and we had such hopes. Just read this cynic in full flood. |
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| Life, Truth and the Mysteries of the
E-gasm 2001 In pre-elc days things looked pretty bad as it seemed that most machines, in primary schools at least, sat under dust-sheets most of the time - what was the point of writing software? |
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| The Tyranny of Fun 2004 No one would publish this - so here it languishes. Another rant, this time about how we seem to be taking our eye off the educational ball. |